Speech by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, at Stanford University
This is a speech delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple and Pixar Animation Studio, at the graduation ceremony of Stanford University on June 12, 2005. I am honored to attend the graduation ceremony with you today. Stanford University is one of the best universities in the world. I didn't graduate from college. To tell the truth, today may be the closest day to graduation from college in my life. Today I want to tell you three stories in my life. It's no big deal, just three stories.
The first story is about how to connect the dots in life.
I dropped out of Reed University after six months, but after eighteen months-before I really decided to drop out, I often went to school. Why did I drop out of school?
The story begins when I was born. My biological mother is a young unmarried college graduate. She decided to let others adopt me. She really wants me to be adopted by college graduates. So when I was born, she made all the preparations so that I could be adopted by a lawyer couple. But what she didn't expect was that when I was born, the lawyer and his wife suddenly decided that they wanted a girl. So my biological parents (who are still on my biological parents' watch list) suddenly received a phone call in the middle of the night: "We have an unexpected baby boy here now. Do you want him? " They replied, "Of course!" But my biological mother later found out that my adoptive mother never went to college and my father never even went to high school. She refused to sign the adoption contract. Only a few months later, my parents promised her that I would go to college, and then she agreed.
At seventeen, I really went to college. But I foolishly chose a school that is almost as expensive as your Stanford University. My parents are still in the blue-collar class, and they spent almost all their savings on my tuition. After six months, I can't see its value. I don't know what to do in life, and I don't know what kind of answer the university can help me find. But here, I almost spent all my parents' life savings. So I decided to drop out of school, which I think is the right decision. There is no denying that I was really scared at that time, but in retrospect, it was really the best decision of my life. At the moment I decided to drop out of school, I finally didn't have to take courses that made me uninterested. Then I can take a class that looks interesting. But it's not that romantic I lost my dormitory and had to sleep on the floor of my friend's room. I went to buy a bottle of coke for 5 cents, just to fill my stomach. On Sunday night, I had to walk seven miles across the city to Hare Krishna Temple for a meal-the only good meal this week. But I like this. I followed my intuition and curiosity, and many things I met later proved to be priceless. Let me give you an example:
Reed University offered the best calligraphy course in America at that time. Every poster and label of every drawer in this university is covered with beautiful calligraphy. Because I dropped out of school and didn't receive formal training, I decided to take this course and learn how to write beautiful calligraphy. I learned san serif and serif fonts, how to change the length of spaces in different letter combinations, and how to make the best printing style. That is a beautiful and real artistic exquisiteness that science can never capture. I think it is really wonderful.
At that time, it seemed that these things had no practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we designed the first Macintosh, this was not the case. I designed all the guys I learned at that time into the Mac. That was the first computer that used beautiful printed fonts. If I hadn't dropped out of school, I wouldn't have had the opportunity to take this excellent calligraphy class that I was interested in, and the Mac wouldn't have so many rich fonts and pleasing font spacing. Then personal computers wouldn't have such wonderful fonts now. Of course, when I was in college, it was impossible to connect the dots of the past, but looking back ten years later, I really suddenly realized.
Again, you can't connect these pieces when you look forward; You can only connect the dots when you look back. So you must believe that one day in your future, these pieces will be connected. You must believe in something: your courage, your goal, your life, what goes around comes around. This process has never let me down, but it has only made my life more different.
My second story is about love and loss. I am lucky because I found something I love very early. Woz and I started Apple in our parents' garage when we were twenty. We work very hard. 10 years later, the company has grown from a pauper in those two garages to a large company with more than 4,000 employees and a value of more than 2 billion. In the ninth year of the company's establishment, we just released the best product, that is Macintosh. I'm going to be thirty, too. That year, I was fired. How did you get fired from the company you started? When Apple developed rapidly, we hired a very talented person to manage the company with me. In the first few years, the company operated very well. But then we disagreed about the future and finally quarreled. The board of directors supported him when the quarrel was fierce. So at the age of thirty, I was fired. I was fired in front of so many people. At the age of 30, all the pillars of my life have left me, which is really a devastating blow. In the first few months, I really didn't know what to do. I lost my passion for starting a business, and I feel that I have depressed all the people who started a business with me. I met david parker and Bob Boyce and tried to apologize to them. I made a mess of things. But I gradually found the light, and I still like what I am doing. What happened at Apple hasn't changed this at all, not at all. I was fired, but I still love it. So I decided to start all over again. I didn't realize this at the time, but it turned out that being fired from Apple was the best thing in my life. Because the feeling of bliss as a successful person has been replaced by the feeling of lightness as an entrepreneur: I don't care so much about anything. This made me feel so free and entered the most creative stage in my life. In the NeXT five years, I founded a company called Next and another company called Pixar, and then I met an elegant woman who later became my wife. Pixar made the world's first computer-generated animated film, Toy Story. Pixar is now the most successful computer production studio in the world. In a series of subsequent operations, Apple acquired NeXT, and then I returned to Apple. The technology we developed at NeXT played a key role in the revival of Apple. I also established a happy family with Lawrence. I'm pretty sure that none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. The taste of this medicine is really bitter, but I think the patient needs it. Sometimes, life will pick up a brick and hit you hard on the head. Don't lose heart. I know very well that the only thing that keeps me going is what I do that I love very much. You need to find what you love. This is true for work, and it is also true for lovers. Your job will take up a large part of your life. Only when you believe that what you are doing is a great job can you feel at ease. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, don't stop, look wholeheartedly, and you'll know when you find it. Just like any sincere relationship, it will only get closer and closer as time goes by. So keep looking until you find it, and don't stop! My third story is about death. When I was seventeen, I read a sentence: "If you live every day as if it were your last, then one day you will find that you are right." This sentence left a deep impression on me. Since then, 33 years have passed, and every morning I look in the mirror and ask myself, "If today is the last day of my life, will you finish what you want to do today?" When the answer is "no" many times in a row, I know I need to change something. Remember that you will die "is the most important motto I have ever met in my life." It helped me point out the important choices in my life. Because almost everything, including all the honors, all the pride, all the fear of embarrassment and failure, will disappear before death. What I see is what really matters. Sometimes you think you will lose something. "Remember that you will die" is the best way I know to avoid these thoughts. You are naked, so you have no reason not to follow your heart. I was diagnosed with cancer about a year ago. I had an examination at 7: 30 in the morning, which clearly showed that my pancreas had a tumor. I don't even know what a pancreas is. The doctor told me that it is probably incurable cancer, and I still have three to six months to live in this world. My doctor told me to go home and tidy up everything. That's the procedure for doctors to prepare for death. That means you will finish what you will say to your children in the next ten years in a few months. This means doing everything well and making life as easy as possible for your family; This means that you must say goodbye. I live with this diagnosis all day. Then one morning, I had a biopsy. The doctor put an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach, and then into my intestine, and took some cells from my pancreatic tumor with a needle. I am calm because I was sedated. But my wife was there, and later told me that when the doctors looked at these cells under the microscope, they began to scream, because these cells turned out to be a very rare pancreatic cancer that could be cured by surgery. I had this operation, and now I'm cured. That was my closest to death, and I hope it will be my closest to death in the next few decades. When I come back from death, and death is only a useful but purely intellectual concept to me, I can tell you with more certainty: no one wants to die, even if people want to go to heaven, they will not die there. But death is the same destination for each of us. No one can escape it. So it should be. Because death is the best invention in life. It clears the old to make way for the new. You are new now, but before long, you will grow old and be cleared away. I'm sorry it's dramatic, but it's true. Your time is limited, don't waste it on repeating other people's lives. Don't be bound by dogma, which means that you live with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let other people's noisy opinions drown out your true inner voice. And most importantly, you should have the courage to listen to your intuition and heart-they know what you want to be to some extent, and everything else is secondary. When I was a child, there was a magazine called Global Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of our generation. It was written by a man named Stuart Brand, who lives in Menlo Park not far from here. He magically brought this book into the world like a poem. It was in the late sixties, before personal computers appeared, so this book was all made of typewriters, scissors and polarizers. This is a bit like Google wrapped in soft skin, which appeared 35 years before Google: it is idealistic, with many clever tools and great ideas.
Stuart and his partners published several issues of the Global Catalogue. When it finished its task, they published the last issue of the catalogue. It was in the mid-1970s, your time. The back cover of the last issue is a photo of a country road in the early morning (if you are adventurous, you can find this road yourself), and there is a paragraph under the photo: "Stay hungry and stay stupid." This is their farewell speech when they stopped publishing. "Stay hungry and stay stupid." I always wish I could be like that. Now, when you are about to graduate and start a new journey, I hope you can do the same:
Stay hungry, stay stupid.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.